What are Java Streams?
This is the introductory lesson on Java streams. You will learn why Java introduces streams and how developers can take advantage of them.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Streams API
Java Streams is a powerful feature introduced in Java 8 that allows developers to process collections of data in a functional programming style.
A stream is a sequence of elements processed in parallel or sequentially.
Streams provide a concise and expressive way to manipulate collections of data by allowing developers to define a pipeline of operations that can be performed on the elements of the stream.
The pipeline typically consists of three parts:
- a source,
- zero or more intermediate operations,
- and a terminal operation.
Sketch
The source of a stream can be a collection, an array, an I/O channel, or any other data source.
Intermediate operations, such as filter()
, map()
, and sorted()
transform and filter the elements of a stream to produce a new stream. Finally, a terminal operation, such as forEach()
, reduce()
, or collect()
, performs a final action on the elements of the stream and produces a result.
The beauty of streams is that they allow developers to perform complex operations on collections of data in a single line of code and can easily leverage multi-core architectures for parallel processing to achieve better performance.
Note: Streams are a powerful tool for working with data collections in Java.
Learn or explore Streams API here: Streams API.
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